Accessing the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon Web Service (AWS) is a group of infrastructure service. It contains Elastic Computing (EC2), SimpleDB, Simple Storage Service (S3), CloudFront, Simple Query Service (SQS), and Premium Support. Amazon S3 is a cloud storage service in the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple web service (RESTful) interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data. However, again, it is mainly target to the developers but not end users. Amazon does not provide any user friendly interface for average users to access the S3. As a result, 3rd party developers creates some clients so that we can use the S3 directly from our PC or Mac.

S3Fox Organizer is a cross-platform (WIndows, Mac OSX, and Linux) Firefox plugin to access the S3 directly just like the other 3rd party FTP client. It offers the ability to upload and download files with the S3. The S3Fox Organizer is a donateware.

S3Hub is a Mac OS X native application to access the Amazon S3 service. You can use S3Hub to view, upload, download, and set permissions with the S3. The user interface is very simple and self explained. It is also a freeware.

The last one is the Jungle Disk Desktop Edition (no screenshot). It is also one of the oldest S3 storage clients. Jungle Disk is very different with the other S3 clients. It uses WebDav to create a mount point on your Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. On the other hand, the Jungle Disk server, which runs locally on your computer connects with the S3. In other words, you can access S3 just like the other network drives. You can perform all the file operations on S3 using Jungle Disk just like operation files locally.